Over the past few years, the author has frequently been featured on radio and television, presenting and commenting on the results of political opinion polls. The polls of May 16th and 17th as conducted by Inter/View, as well as those organized by the Nipo and the NSS indicated that the CDA and the VVD stood a considerable chance of not being able to maintain the majority (less than 75 seats in parliament). In the election of May 21st, however, the governing coalition ended up with no less than 81 seats. This discrepancy could be attributed in its entirety to the results of the CDA, the party of the popular Prime-Minister Lubbers. For 11 of the 12 parties, the election results were virtually identical to Inter/View's minimum predictions. Only the CDA scored considerably higher than the predicted maximum. It can be demonstrated that these changes took place within the last few days before the election. Voters switched to the CDA from all other parties. The polls, published before the election, rank as one of the main factors that influenced these major changes. In particular the threat of the coalition losing their majority and Lubbers consequently being unable to "finish the job" (CDA's election slogan), produced these changes.
During the seventies the readership of printed media in The Netherlands was measured by the Nationale Onderzoek Persmedia (NOP). The NOP surveys were conducted every two years on the basis of circa 10.000 individual, face-to-face, interviews and, above ail, the research costs were met by the publishers themselves - the dailies and the periodicals. The questionnaire included a large number of questions which had to be cross-tabulated against the media information. At the same time it was possible for the participants of NOP to add their own questions to the omnibus survey which was conducted in association with the NOP survey. The related computer planning tapes were made by CDC in Rijswijk and it was possible to obtain further direct analyses via terminals by means of a computer programm written by SCBEMAP. The media planning work was mainly carried out by the publishers, usually at the request of an advertising agency. From 1979 problems developed to such an extent amongst the NOP participants that, in 1982 a number of publishers (of dailies, for example) decided not to take part any more. The outcome of the differences which arose out of the 1982 NOP programme can largely be placed to the account of changes which were then made not only to the basic questionnaire but also to the method of fieldwork. On these matters a good deal of controversial discussion took place. It was in this context that Inter/View BV of Amsterdam, with its Media-Scanner service and its IMAP/2000 program decided that steps had to be taken to rationalise the whole process of media planning in The Netherlands.